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Methodist
church, Terrington St Clement

One of the joys of making
a public journey around the churches of East
Anglia has been the hundreds (and probably
thousands by now) of family history researchers
in North America and Australia who have contacted
me and asked me to keep a look out for obscure
non-conformist chapels and churches. Many of
these people have never visited England, and know
that they never will now. It is a privilege and
an honour to serve the East Anglian diaspora in
this way.

I had heard
worried rumblings about this chapel - it was
closed! It was being demolished! In fact, the
thriving Methodist community in this area were
doing that very thing that we admire them for -
rebuilding to suit their modern liturgical needs.
Looking at vast palaces like Terrington
St Clement parish
church, built as a Catholic church and now used
as an Anglican one, it is so easy to forget that
by the early 19th century most English people
were not Anglicans or Catholics at all, but
Methodists and Baptists.

In these early 21st century days, as the
Anglican church goes into freefall and the Catholic
church has become the biggest church in the land again
for the first time in half a millennium, it is pleasant
and reassuring to see that a remote non-conformist
congregation like this still goes about its independent
and enthusiastic business in a way that is designed to
suit itself and not its spin doctors. The new church is
simple, functional, and very comfortable. The 20 or so
gravestones that had to be moved for the building have
been reset in a prominent place on the edge of the new
car park.

Norfolk has hundreds of non-conformist
churches, past and present. Thousands of them, probably.
I put hardly any of them onto this site; but some of them
I do, simply because it pleases me to do so. Any
requests?